Synopsis

In Little Green, Walter Mosley’s acclaimed detective Easy Rawlins returns from the brink of death to investigate the dark side of that haven for Los Angeles hippies, the Sunset Strip. He’s soon back in top form, cruising the gloriously psychedelic mean streets of L.A. with his murderous sidekick, Mouse. They’ve been hired to look for a young black man, Evander “Little Green” Noon, who disappeared during an acid trip.

Fueled by an elixir called Gator’s Blood, Easy experiences a physical, spiritual, andemotional resurrection, but peace and love soon give way to murder and mayhem.

Excerpt

1

I came half-awake, dead and dreaming. My eyes were open but I couldn’t focus on anything because I was still falling, as if the nightmare had followed me from sleep into the waking world. I didn’t know where I was or where I’d come from. But the bed under me was turning and falling and I, I was sure, had perished. This sensation was so real, so palpable that I closed my eyes and moaned. The movement of the bed then took on a temporal quality; instead of falling I had become unmoored in time: traveling backward and then forward through a life that was mine and yet, at the same time, foreign to me.

I watched my mother dying in the bedroom of our shanty house in New Iberia, Louisiana. She was laid up in a feather bed, a big woman who was trying to catch her breath but couldn’t inhale right. It sounded like she was drowning. She was so pretty, I thought. I had once loved her but could no longer raise this feeling in my heart. I might have even smiled as she shuddered under the labor of simple breathing.

Then I tumbled into a boxcar peopled by brooding and silent black men. They stared at the boy and he saw from their point of view a scared eight-year-old orphan child looking for companionship in those angry, bloodshot eyes. I was no longer that kid but had become those men who couldn’t care about another defenseless child orphaned and destined, probably, to die. I saw myself and wondered, almost idly, if that young son would live to the end of the line.

I was surprised to see that he had made it to Fifth Ward, Houston, Texas. Stealing oranges, skulking in back-alley corners, asking everyone he met if they knew a name--Martin. “My grandfather,” he said. He’d learned to speak up and stand straight. He already carried scars that would follow him through life but he found his grandfather: a hard man who allowed him to sleep on the outside front porch at night.

Time picked up speed after that. In an instant the boy, Ezekiel, was a young man, a fool who signed up for the army, for the war. He passed through North Africa, then Italy and France. He fought men and killed them out of reflex and fear. He liberated a concentration camp, a killer opening the gates for the dead and the dying and those left with the image of death permanently imprinted on their souls.

I was dying, no, had died.

Returning to Houston, the man, no longer weak or afraid, found that most of his friends in that part of town were deceased. Renfro had been slaughtered by a jealous woman named Theresa who in turn died from alcohol poisoning. Martin killed a white man and then shot himself in the burning shack where the boy had slept on the porch. Minna Rogers, Delphine Montesque, Michael Michaels, Big Boy Sanders, and dozens of others, all died while the boy-turned-man had survived the greatest war in history.

“Easy?”

There was a flood rising in the room that was swathed in darkness. My right ankle was shackled to the floor next to the bed, and the water was already up to my ears. I pulled against the chain but all that did was cause me pain. My ankle hurt like a motherfucker and the chain would not give. I tried to rise, hoping that I could float to the extent of the bond, that maybe I could keep my nose above water, but I knew somehow that my luck had run out, that Death had come in on me while I was distracted by the mountains of evil I had lived through. Just the fact that I could survive such terror made me guilty, and now he was coming up through the floorboards like he did for my mother.

Death. I had followed him through all the years of my life as he dropped bodies in my path as little reminders to me and others that the end of the road was no bed of roses, no kingdom come. It felt as if my whole life was an obstacle course, a slogging journey trying to catch up with Death, trying to get a good look at his face. . . .

“Easy.”

And then, up ahead, on my journey through a past life that no longer belonged to me, I saw his back; the Reaper was right there in front of me, carelessly firing a pistol into the night. I could reach out and touch his shoulder. When I did this he grunted and turned and I realized that I knew this being, this deadly force that had dogged me from the earliest moments of my life.

He was well dressed for any occasion or epoch. Smiling with a gold tooth that had a diamond embedded in it, he was a colored man, not black but light-skinned and light-eyed. A brother who had littered the road I traveled with so many dead that even he had lost count.

“Easy.”

His lips didn’t move but I recognized my name, my true name, not the one my dead father gave me. Raymond Alexander, known as Mouse to his victims and friends alike, smiled at me and I shivered in pleasure and fear.

“Ray,” I said, and his smile slowly diminished.

He stared at me and shook his head. I almost cried but then I remembered who I was and what I’d been through.

“No, man,” I said. “You can’t dismiss me like some schoolkid. You can’t turn your back on me after all these years.”

He smiled again, and even though I was dead I felt elation. This emotion was followed by the sense of falling again. There was a broad ocean rippling gently under a partial moon and the execution of a perfect accelerating arc of plummeting downward. A shackle was affixed painfully to my right ankle but, impossibly, Mouse was still standing there in front of me, his expression daring me to do something about the fix I was in.

“You expect me to fly, motherfucker?” I yelled.

Mouse laughed without sound and nodded at me.

“Easy, wake up.”

The command was feminine, a nuisance that somehow carried weight. The panorama of my hallucinatory journey called to me. I wanted to go off with Mouse, to follow the long line of dead black folks, soldiers, and Jews. I wanted to join the people I killed and the ones I couldn’t save. I wanted to shed my scarred and pain-riddled body. One more breath seemed like too much to bear.

“Easy, it’s time for you to wake up.”

I tried to open my eyes but I was a child again, a slave to sleep, needing just two more minutes of rest. But a hand shook my shoulder and little aches came awake through my upper torso and down my spine.

It was this pain that opened my eyes.

I could see after a fashion but my vision wasn’t proper yet. I couldn’t get a bead on the room I was in, but the beautiful Asian woman sitting beside me on the bed was clear and present as a Catholic priest preparing to give last rites.

About Walter Mosley

Walter Mosley is the author of more than forty books, most notably eleven previous Easy Rawlins mysteries, the first of which, Devil in a Blue Dress, was made into an acclaimed film starring Denzel Washington. Always Outnumbered was an HBO film starring Laurence Fishburne, adapted from his first Socrates Fortlow novel. A native of Los Angeles and a graduate of Goddard College, he holds an MFA from CCNY and lives in Brooklyn, New York. He is the winner of numerous awards, including an O. Henry Award, a Grammy and PEN America's Lifetime Achievement Award.

Praise

Praise

“Mosley writes like a slumming angel, and his evocation of mid-century L.A. is worth savoring.” —The Detroit News

“Faster, smarter and more gutsy than any of its predecessors. . . . Mosley writes mysteries, but they’re also literary jewels and priceless social history.” —The Globe and Mail (Toronto)

“Mosley is never better than when he’s got a juicy cut of history to chew on, and the hippie counterculture of the late ’60s perfectly feeds his style.” —The New York Times Book Review

“Mosley’s project, like James Ellroy’s, like Chester Himes’s, has always been to use the genre to explore history and racial politics. He’s a thinker and a polemicist and not just a mystery guy.” —Los Angeles Times

“Rawlins himself is at the heart of the series’ appeal: a well-read auto-didact and man of action, father of found children and spouse to no one who sometimes sees his double life, divided between the land of law and the underworld.” —The Wall Street Journal

“The Easy Rawlins novels. . . . have never been mere whodunits. Taken together, they are nothing less than a history of race relations in post-World War II Los Angeles. Little Green more than lives up to the high standard the author has set.” —Associated Press

“The mix of hardboiled detective narrative and social philosophizing on African American life . . . [is what] makes Easy such an enduring figure and his comeback so welcome.” —The Houston Chronicle

“[A] major event for crime-fiction fans. . . . Mosley returns here to doing what he does best: setting the pain and pleasure of individual lives, lived mostly in L.A.’s black community, within an instantly recognizable historical moment and allowing the two to feed off one another.” —Booklist

“Superb. . . . If there were an Edgar for best comeback player, Easy Rawlins would be a shoo-in.” —Publishers Weekly (starred review)

“Rawlins, Mouse, and the world they live in have as many sharp, hard surfaces as ground obsidian. But Mosley gives them an additional facet. Whereas the traditional hard-boiled detective is a lonely, solitary figure, Rawlins is surrounded by a family of his own making, an adopted, makeshift, multi-ethnic family that reflects and prefigures the realities of modern America.” —Tulsa World

“Mosley is a master of historical setting and atmosphere, and he does a dazzling job of capturing the 1960s vibe of the Strip, from the free-spirited innocence of the flower children to the sinister glint of those who prey upon them.” —Tampa Bay Times

“[In Easy,] Mosley has created a flesh-and-blood man who transcends the page and walks forever in our imaginations.” —Minneapolis Star-Tribune

“A powerful writer, with such well-honed prose and so strong a sense of place that his books are always entertaining.” —The Philadelphia Inquirer

“Unraveling the puzzles . . . is almost as enjoyable as marveling at the author’s nimble mind, and discovering, yet again, that the prolific Mosley has many more tales to tell.” —The Boston Globe